By making posts from blogs available along with results from news sites, Yahoo hopes to capitalize on the firsthand accounts of major news stories as seen by everyday people.
Initially, Yahoo’s news search will only incorporate a subset of blogs in its index as it beta tests this new feature. In its latest blog entry, Yahoo said it plans to expand that search to include the 20+ million blogs from the blo.gs ping stream, which it purchased earlier this year.
The integration of blog posts with results from news sites will also see other Yahoo properties included when they are relevant to a story. Flickr photos and links from the company’s My Web service may show up in a news search.
Results from Yahoo’s new podcast service may be included as Yahoo includes more community content with search results. “So as you’re reading your news, which of course many millions of people do every day week, and month on Yahoo, you will start to be introduced to podcasts and start to be introduced to the podcast experience of the site,” Yahoo’s chief product officer Geoff Ralston told Podtech.net in an interview.
Yahoo described the rationale for including blog entries with its news search in its post:
The experiences and opinions published on blogs make a great addition to the mainstream news people read everyday. And major world events are further fueling the growth of blogs as platforms for anyone who wants to have a public voice. At times, even everyday bloggers beat the mainstream media to a story.
In testing the new feature via Yahoo News Search, a query for Harriet Miers, the nominee for the Supreme Court, returned news results from the Baltimore Sun and WorldNet Daily in the main results.
On the right side of the page in a box marked Blogs Beta, four results out of 1,229 appeared from sites like Outside The Beltway and Underneath Their Robes. A link to retrieve more blog results is at the bottom of the box.
Not all blogs are equal in this example. In the example search for Harriet Miers, the seventh news result was from an entry to HuffingtonPost.com, which has an existing relationship with Yahoo. That site is very much a blog, but does not appear in the blog results box; it shows up with the regular news search results.
One surprise that showed up in the blog results was an MSN video from MSNBC TV, the cable news channel. While it doesn’t gather the ratings like Fox News, MSNBC seems to fit the definition of news site much more than it does that of a blog. Could that be a little bit of a competitive slap from Yahoo?
David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business. Email him here.
